Day: December 30, 2002

Haddock a la whatever

After my first workout in over three years tonight, Lisa and I went shopping and had a cook-off. She did haddock steamed in white wine over green beans and broccoli in foil. I did haddock grilled (well, fried in a grill-pan) with an improvised sauce, as follows: rice bran oil; soy sauce; chopped ginger, serrano pepper, and shallot; sea salt; and a little sugar to taste. Sauce brushed over the fish as it cooked. Served over rice with chopped cilantro and scallions. I’m not saying who won the cook-off but oh man mine was good.

My in-laws found “Roman Holiday” on AMC which was the perfect follow-up to the dinner. I’d love to watch “Sabrina” with them, but alas tomorrow is a work day…

Two more ’Hoos with Blogs

Greg points to two relatively recent additions to the Blogosphere: Lisa Guernsey and Rob Krupicka. They’re husband and wife and both Virginia alums, but have very different takes on the blog world: Lisa is blogging about search engines and their social meaning, and Rob is blogging about his newly announced candidacy for Alexandria City Council.

What Greg does not mention, probably because he doesn’t read the Reverse Cowgirl’s blog, is that this is the same Lisa Guernsey who kicked up a sh*tstorm recently with her article about women who blog for the New York Times. Lots of people chimed in: the Reverse Cowgirl was particularly vociferous, claiming that her thesis was that “in the blogosphere, male bloggers dominate and women bloggers are oppressed.”

The RC also noted that Lisa appeared to have visited about six blogs before settling on her thesis that the men outnumber (or at least out-shout) the women in the blogosphere. But how would she have found the other sites? If you’re a blogging journalist, you’ll read other blogging journalists, which leads inexorably to Andrew Sullivan and the male-dominated warblogging world. But what if there were some other way to find blogs based on your affiliations? I wonder whether it isn’t time for some sort of registry of Hoos Who Blog.™ I know, I know, we have all these blog indices already, but to the best of my knowledge none of them have alumni affiliations. If Classmates wanted to be cool they’d add a spot for Weblog URL in their online profiles and allow you to search just for fellow bloggers.

Craig: Post-Christmas shopping hostage-taking

I’m still catching up with weblog updates from the last week. Craig has what I think must be the funniest take on post-holiday-shopping ever:

…they are a people ripe for revolution. There’s so many shoppers, and so few staff members, that all it would take is one khaki and mock turtleneck sweater-clad minivan driving suburbanite spartacus to throw off their recipts and original product packaging of bondage, rally the spirits of their brothers and sisters that are being kept down by The Man (r)(tm)(c) and rise up against their oppressors. Surely they can find a better way to run things. I was waiting for someone on the edge to just totally snap and take a hostage with a pricing gun. “Don’t come near me! I’ll mark her down 50%! I’ll mark you all down 50%! You’ll never take me at full retail value!”

New Years’ cuisine

Feels funny to be back at the office today. No one is around. It’s very quiet. I want to go out in the hallway and make some kind of loud sound just to see if anyone is awake.

My in-laws are still in town. Lisa will likely be taking them all over Seattle today and tomorrow in a search for a traditional Italian New Years sausage called cotechino. The usual recipe, which we cooked last year but I inexplicably failed to comment on, is cotechino with lentils. Because the cotechino sausage is so large, it looks like a coin when sliced, and the meal is supposed to bring good luck for the New Year. I don’t know the symbolic meaning of the lentils, but having them is for me a nod to my uncle’s traditional New Years Day dish, Hoppin’ John, which features black-eyed peas rather than lentils.

I hope they find the cotechino. I remember the recipe as tasting much better than Hoppin’ John. Given the dubious existence of good Italian butchers in greater Seattle, though, we may be stuck…